caoilte

Unit tests are just as important as integration tests as long as they're tightly scoped to business logic and aren't written just to improve coverage. Anything can be done badly, especially if it is quantified and used as a metric of success (Goodhart's law applies).

Integration tests can be just as bad in this regard. They can be flakey and take hours, give you a false sense of security and not even address the complexity of the business domain.

I've seen people argue against unit tests because they force you to decompose your system into discrete pieces. I hope that's not the core concern here becuase a well decomposed system is easier to maintain and extend as well as write unit tests for.

OP is probably referring to braceless syntax.

I can offer a rationale that I hope that will be interesting. Evidence is more effort than I'm willing to invest in a random internet conversation. I hope that's okay. I don't mean to cause offense, but neither do I like having an interesting discussion shutdown.

Executive leadership compensation tends to be based on, - the size/prospects/complexity of the company - the compensation received by executives in similar roles at other companies - the amount/type of oversight by the board

This incentivizes executives to increase the complexity of their role in order to justify greater remuneration. The classic example is turning a widget factory into a widget financial services provider. In this case, by behaving like Silicon Valley companies chasing the latest fad the executive leadership of Mozilla get to demand the same remuneration packages.

It's a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. As far as I can tell this is (like most complicated things in life) purely a tax dodge.

No? They, just like every other entity, will have to achieve it's investors goals using the least amount of costs possible.

The Mozilla Foundation is funded by donors not investors. The fiduciary duties of non-profit directors do not have to include using the least amount of costs possible.

The Mozilla Foundation's stated goals are "to advance the vision of the future of the internet and technology".

You might reasonably argue that this means copy catting every other product by slapping AI on itself, but I would counter that this actually demonstrates a lack of vision.

people will blame anyone for anything.

mozilla is a non-profit so doesn't need to respond to market signals.

it would do a lot more and a lot more sustainably if it focused on the core mission of its browser.

but these costly "big swings" justify outrageous compensation packages for its executives and so it lets its browser wither.

get the project taken over by a foundation eg the Apache Foundation.

Those are false equivalencies. The EU bureaucracy is a mess of competing factions. It isn't a corporation or a political party. A better analogy would be a US Government department breaking a law.

Ideally there are are legal avenues for redress in your situation. If there are not, that is more likely to be the problem than a conspiracy of propaganda.

You get ads outside the UK, which is always weird for me when i get back from holiday and have a bunch of shows i downloaded while I was in another country and haven't listened to yet. Actually, I say bunch - but I've deleted everything except In Our Time. Australian Broadcast Company does more better podcasts than BBC these days.

The BBC is another bad actor in this space (although increasingly irrelevant). Their decision to "hide" most of their RSS feeds whilst still labeling their proprietary app subscribe links podcasts was unethical.

I see hope in the Patreon model. I don't mind paying a monthly subscription for a specific show if I get a locked down RSS link.

i think the reason is fair, but unfortunately it is a dealbreaker for me. i would definitely have got one earlier this year if it had had one.

yes

It might even be correct. Occasionally.

Keepassxc is great and works well with keepass2android via file sharing.

I can imagine how the password sharing would be a problem tho.

H1B is a lemon market for those signing up just the same as those surrendering their passports and ending up a working prisoner. Each might luck out, but they're more likely to get exploited and regret their decision. And it gets worse every year.

H1B might not meet the legal definition of modern slavery even though many are trapped just as effectively by the system but everyone in evolved with employing them is morally compromised just the same.

AI could take over and supplant a global government, threatening society, life, wealth etc etc.

How would we tell the difference?

Dunno if anything has changed since last year but this was a very interesting post by one of the authors of Cats Effect - https://www.reddit.com/r/scala/comments/sa927v/how_will_loom...

TLDR; it didn't look like it would impact effect systems much at all and most of the benefits (initially) are to make imperative code more performant. So I guess it closes the performance gap somewhat which is good, but won't be a big deal to anyone already using their own concurrency construct.

And the amount spent is a pittance to western governments

I don't consider well north of $100billion and climbing to be a pittance.

We could, and imo we should, give Ukraine to means to win.

And yet we haven't. The Ukrainians are still rationing artillery fire, appear to have lost most of their air defence cover and long ago lost air cover.

If we were serious about winning the US government would have switched to a planned economy (as we did in WW2), taken control of munitions production and gotten a handle on our out of control military contract padding.

But I would say there is a calculation going on the US about stringing out the war longer

That's certainly one way to spin trying to lose more slowly.

Also what outcome do you want? We surely don't want Russia to win this and think its great and start more wars and repress more people. I think we should care at least.

a negotiated peace. Tricky given all of the times the US has betrayed Russian trust over the last ten years. The only plausible route feels like a massive neutral DMZ (probably everything east of the Dnipro) administered by a BRICS led UN peace keeping force.

Hugely embarrassing for the West and NATO, but would end the killing and devastation and allow us to concentrate on the real threat of climate change.

Funding this war (which we're losing) is gutting funding for further education and scientific research.

It's possible there's a secret plan which will turn things around, but it seems more likely that the only thing which benefits from our inevitable defeat is the arms industry.

Being the victim of an aggressor does not automatically make everything the Ukrainian government says true. That's bad logical thinking.

They used to have an option to permanently block sites from your google results. They quietly dropped it even before they dropped reader.

It's more like it's one way to funnel money to an asset or network without raising suspicions.

But you're right, it was mostly about the propaganda. And not even particularly covert. The bit that did it has since been carved out into other agencies (eg National Endowment for Democracy).

Political parties aren't people so assigning feelings to them is of questionable value, but no more so than calling someone insane for doing so.

The underlying fact is that the Republican and Democratic Party are both constituted to represent their donors and that certain parties (rich individuals being the largest such party) enjoy the benefit of giving bi-partisan patronage.

The thing being distorted is not passing tests, it's education.

Learning the source material for tests does not give you a good education.

IMO they're more likely to mess up their cartel/monopoly position by getting too greedy than by being unable to hire competent staff (see Doctorow's [enshittification cycle](https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/) for more).

One limiting factor was that this wasn't scalable - so a lot of people would be comfortable with it because there is little potential for widespread abuse - there just aren't enough resources to search & monitor everyone's mail and houses at all times.

It's recently started to emerge that US opened and censored all international mail 1950-1989. We're talking millions of letters a week. It started as a measure to remove all reference to US use of biological weapons in the Korean War and grew from there. (the third season of the Blowback Podcast did a couple of interviews which covered it really well.)

Hacking individuals in this way is already done via targeted 0-day exploits. The targets are more likely to be journalists and activists (for their sources) though.

The noided assumption is that politicians and business leaders self-compromise in order to boost their chances of career success (and/or that they see getting compromised by Epstein et al as a career perk rather than a career mistake). It's the same principle as cops only being able to get promoted if they're known to be on the take.

This sort of law enables dragnet surveillance. Domestic Intelligence are always looking for new ways to take temperature readings on agitation before it boils over into public protest and to identify previously unknown community leaders that should be placed under more direct surveillance.

The FAANG key competitive advantage is cartel/monopoly status. Getting employees into the office is just middle management ego stroking, it won't actually help them.

The degree to which they maintain market dominance over the next 5-10 years will depend on how well they time buying out startups which threaten their dominance (and which will no doubt be built by more productive WFH employees).

the capital risk wasn't yours so much.

You asked "Who takes more risks" not who put more capital at risk. Founders I have known had plenty of capital and risking some of it on startups wasn't nearly as risky to their life as it was for many of their employees for whom this was their only roll of the dice and had no savings.

6. Which brings more value to a community, a person who works in an office doing menial admin work for 5 years, or a person who spends 5 years founding a new company that provides medical services to the community, employs 100 people, and produces tax receipts (direct and indirect) of 1000x the person who works in an office doing menial admin work?

I love the way you completely passed over whether or not the founder does any work at all beyond providing the capital. Plenty of founders work hard, but plenty more bring connections and capital and are otherwise a productivity drain.

So again, as before, it depends on the productive work being done by that person. And they shouldn't get to take the credit for the taxes paid by their employees or the profits earned by everyone in the company. That's a shared achievement.

And why define a person just by what they do in their job? The person doing menial admin work could be doing all sorts of other amazing voluntary work that eclipses anything the founder provides in value.

You don't have to hate or dislike people for creating value — creating jobs and providing services is crucial to the economies around the world.

And yet it's ideologically orthodox to hate governments for doing exactly these things.

There seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to such a question of "well the office worker has value too", yes, nobody is saying people are value-less, but there is an objective reality that some people produce more value than others.

That is true enough.

Ultimately, my purposefully crafted questions lead up to one thing: some people deserve to be paid more than others.

Even if it was true that people are paid according to the value they produce (they are not) it does not follow that they deserve to be.

Take a doctor who delivers immense value to their patients. They can only do so thanks to the hospital they work in, thanks to the education they received and the equipment they have access to.

Or consider a founder who starts a company benefitting from the concentration of talent created by a university doing world class research and attracting the best students.

What people deserve to be paid is a social question. When we choose to pay San Francisco founders millions and let thousands of people be homeless, that's a social choice about our shared values.

Who takes more risks, a person who works 37.5 hours in an office or a founder who puts their own capital in to try and create a company?

Inherited capital in every startup I've worked at. And enough of it that they got several runs at success. It wasn't risky at all.

Which brings more value to a community, a person who is employed, or a person who employs people?

Too vague a generalisation to have any value. What matters is who does the work and the social value of that work.